Those looking for certainties are seldom long on a deepening spiritual path. Many of us have experienced that the life of the Spirit does not offer an abundance of answers as we journey on, but rather more questions. At the same time, however, there also grows more tolerance for the questions, more willingness to let things be unresolved, more acceptance of what we do not know, more willingness to step into areas that seem dark and foreboding in the soul's landscape.
I try to keep these two maxims about spiritual growth before me always. They help me to stay open to whatever is next, whatever comes, whatever is.
1. The spiritual journey is going to take you to a place you cannot imagine.
If you think you know what the destination of your journey looks like, it is not truly a spiritual journey -- that is, guided by Spirit. The spiritual journey means stepping into the unknown, into cloud and darkness, without have a predetermined notion of what the outcome will be.
Many of us begin the journey because we want some specific outcome from it. That's fine. Go ahead and begin the journey that way. But hold the outcome loosely, because eventually you will find your own expectations altered as you realize God has an altogether different goal in mind for you.
Thomas Merton wrote about this sense in which we travel without knowing where exactly we will land.
"No amount of imagination and metaphor can begin to convey what is meant by contemplative experience of God present in one's own soul. . . . It is a kind of interior revolution, drawing the soul inexplicably out of its normal routines of thought and desire to seek what cannot be thought and to grasp what lies beyond all desire. . . . The soul simply plunges into the darkness without knowing why, and tends blindly toward something it knows not. Only later is there a strong, subjective verification of the truth that this "something" toward which the soul is groping is really God Himself and not just an idea of God or a velleity for union with Him." (Merton, The Inner Experience, "Infused Contemplation," pp. 72-73.)
2. The road that takes you to your destination will not be the road you would have chosen for yourself.
Most always, the road that leads to our destination is full of difficulties and the pain of letting go the things -- ideas, beliefs, people, possessions, achievements, and so on -- to which we have clung for happiness over the years or decades. At the very least, we are invited over the course of the journey to be in relationship with those "things" in very different ways than previously.
In reality, we don't get to choose what appears on the path. The road we walk is itself out of our control, beyond our ability to manage, at least if it is a true spiritual path. We don't get to choose the options that are necessarily easy or pain-free, the courses of travel that have least resistance.
For example, I don't have the option of choosing yes or no on the cancers, the deaths, the forced terminations, the hurricanes and floods, the economy, the random acts of violence, the divide between me and family members.
In her classic poem "The Journey," Mary Oliver describes the path that seems to choose many of us. In the middle of the poem she describes the impediments on the journey in this way:
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
(Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems: Volume One, Boston: Beacon Press)
"The road full of fallen branches and stones" . . . who chooses that? Yet, most always the spiritual path will be littered with various fallen branches and stones.
As I said previously, if you can imagine the journey's outcome and the path you need to take in order to get there, then you may be on a journey of your own design and your own making. The spiritual journey is a journey laid out, guided, and shepherded by the Spirit of God . . . a journey to which we are invited in trust and faith, not in certainties and absolutes.
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